ntold.
Gifford Barrett laughed.
"It was very absurd, very ignominious; but the fact is, I was run into
by a woman, one day in a pelting shower, and knocked heels over head off
my bicycle."
Sitting in the doorway, Phebe had been holding a book in her hands. Now
it fell to the floor with a crash.
"Drop something, Babe?" Hubert asked amicably.
"Yes, my book," she answered shortly.
"I shall never forget my emotions at the time," Gifford Barrett was
saying to Billy. "I had been off for a long ride, one day, and was
caught, on the way home, in this heavy shower. The road was all up and
down hill, and just as I came down one hill, the damsel came down the
other. She had lost both her pedals, and you've no idea how she looked,
bouncing and bumping along, with her soaked skirt flopping in the wind.
She hadn't even the grace to be pretty, so there wasn't an atom of
romance in the affair from first to last. She was a great, overgrown
country girl, and tied on the front of her wheel she had a bundle that I
took for some sort of marketing stuff; but, just as she met me, it popped
open and out tumbled a whole assortment of bones, human bones, legs and
arms and a skull. What do you suppose she could have been doing with
them? She was too young and fair to have been an undertaker."
"They might have belonged to her ancestors, and she have been taking
them home for burial," Hubert suggested.
Mr. Barrett chuckled in a manner which suggested the composer in him had
not entirely ousted the boy.
"Anyway, she is short a skull. I sent out, the next day, and had it
brought to me. I have it yet."
"Did she hit you?" Theodora asked.
"Hit me! I should think she did. She was large, and she came at me with a
good deal of force. The last I remember, I felt the crash, and I knew I
had had the worst of it." He rubbed his arm sympathetically at the
recollection.
"What became of you?" Mrs. McAlister inquired. "Did she pick you up and
carry you home?"
"Not she. She was an Amazon, not a Valkyrie within hailing distance of
Valhalla."
"Who was she?" Theodora asked. "The story ought to have a sequel."
"It hasn't. It ended in mystery. The girl vanished into thin air, and a
man, driving by, found me lying in the mud, with a skull on one side of
me and a white sailor hat on the other, neither of them my property."
"Just rode away and left you with a compound fracture?" The doctor's
tone was incredulous.
"Apparently, for she
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